


Old Habits

by Prostranstvo



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bathtub Sex, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Light Angst, Masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 14:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6082653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prostranstvo/pseuds/Prostranstvo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-game. A day in the life of Triss Merigold, and her wondering if her new life in Kovir might just be a wonderful mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Habits

**Author's Note:**

> First time writing for this fandom. Hope I didn't fuck anything up too bad. Reviews are more than welcome. EDIT: That being said, I changed the ending around because I wasn't happy with it the first time I published this at 3AM. >:3

Triss wakes before him. Always just before dawn as the first of what little bit of light they have in the north slowly creeps through the window and touches the lining of the damask curtains that canopy their four post bed. Carefully and slowly, removing herself hesitantly from underneath his massive arm and the piles of furs they cocooned themselves in during the night, she braces herself as her bare feet come in contact with the cold floor. Her very nature is sanguine, there is fire in her blood, and she draws from those internal flames to heat herself as she makes her way for her robe. Even all they way in Pont Vanis they still sleep naked. 

Old habits die hard, she thinks.

An idiom that keeps her up at night. 

She covers the curves of her body with silk embroidered with bright gold flowers that bare her name. Green stems and yellow petals swirl around her hips disappearing into a field around her thighs. It was a birthday gift bought with money made from a contract with a local miner whose prospects were being hindered by a cockatrice nesting on his property. That night her Witcher staggered through the door with a sizable gash between his ribs that she later soothed with a mixture of goldenseal and honeysuckle and chastised with her worried mouth. Geralt gave her the gift to her two days later presenting her with a simple brown parcel after she had changed his bandages. Sky blue satin and gilded silk poured out of the box like water, a small waterfall being held in her hands that shimmered in the candlelight. Her birthday wasn't for another week she said. He told her to put it on anyway, that he couldn't wait a whole week for the chance to take it off her. For a second she wondered if he had used that line before, somewhere a long time ago while presenting somebody else a similar robe in black, and as she slid the fabric over her shoulders and felt his hot breath and rough stubble brush against the nape of her neck, she secretly shamed herself for having thought such a thing. 

Jealously. Such a dirty word.

Old habits die hard, she thinks. 

With a wave of her hand water appears in the modestly sized copper bathtub. From a drawer in the bureau underneath the mirror she removes various oils, and as she pours them into the water the smell of sweet vanilla and wild rose mixes in with the steam filling the entire room. Outside the window she can just make out the snowy peaks of distant mountains along the horizon. Somewhere beyond them lies Kaer Morhen. Eskel is probably there, patching the holes left from the siege, not out of dedication to the place, but rather as a tribute to Vesemir. To the south of that lies Keira and Lambert, walking along the Path together and discovering themselves and each other in a way that she herself knows of all too well. Somewhere beyond that lies Ciri on a path of her own, chopping off some poor nekker's head for an amount either too little or too high. There was never a middle ground with her. For a child of the Elder Blood it was either all or nothing. 

Beyond that to the east is Yen.

“You're practically a homewrecker, Triss,” Philippa had told her once after a rather tedious meeting between the advisers to the kings of Nilfgaard and Kovir. “Most people can't outmaneuver Yennefer though, so congratulations. Consider me impressed that you think better with your vagina than she does with her brain.” 

She submerges herself in the bath to get clean, hoping the water will wash the pit in her stomach away. Slumping her shoulders she drowns herself in the fragrant warm water, and if she closes her eyes tight enough she swears she is back in the garden at Flotsam underneath the watchful stone eyes of Eldan and Cymoril. Unconsciously her hand moves through the water coming to rest on her inner thigh. Moving it higher it grazes her vulva, and she eventually spreas open her rosebud colored lips with her fingertips. For a moment she is transported back to the ruins of an ancient elven bath. She swears if she strains her ears enough she can even hear the trickling of the spring. It is here in the middle of this thought that a calloused knuckle brings her back to the present when it brushes a stray strand of red hair away from her face. Right now her hand remains still, resting just south of her clitoris, ready to move again at his slightest touch.

“Started without me, did you?”

Kneeling before her he is naked and the steam from the bath has already begun to cling to his pale skin. Every scar on him she has cataloged in her mind, she knows how he got each one and when. The patch of dull skin that remains after a burn from basilisk venom on his right shoulder. The four long claw marks left by a werewolf on his back. The bruxa bite on the left side of his neck. She has charted them like scholars chart the stars. Each one is its own constellation that she uses as a map to find her way home in the dark.

“You looked so peaceful sleeping, I didn't want to wake you until breakfast.”

“Breakfast hmm.”

Cat like eyes attentively look her over as his hand moves from the side of her face, eager fingertips trace their way down her neck to her chest and end right above her nipple. Lazily he outlines her areola with the tip of his thumb, tracing circles around her prickled flesh until the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up as though she were suddenly dropped in ice. Between her legs once steady fingers tremble as she is ready to imitate his touch and offer herself relief. She swore she was stronger than this.

“You know Triss, I can think of something else right now I'd like to eat.”

Before she can even retort about how she was already literally quite wet, he joins her in the tub. Calloused fingers end up snaking their way around hers. Gently he glides her slender hand into all too familiar territory for him, and she feels herself tightening all over as both their fingers enter her at the same time. A soft moan escapes from the back of her throat as his chapped lips leave a path of kisses and small bites along her jugular. His other hand, free to do as it pleases cups her breast, barely being able to fit all the flesh of her bust inside his massive palms. You can still see the spiderwebs of burn scars on her chest, interwoven raised lines of pink and red skin that he has kissed a thousand times before. Sometimes she regrets not dying at Sodden, dying a hero is far more dignified than living as a so called home-wrecker, but sometimes during moments like this, when her body goes limp and she concentrates on his heartbeat and the steady pulsation causing fire to run from her loins all the way up her spine, she doesn't regret it at all. Sometimes, she wouldn't have it any other way.

\-----

Later that night, after their bath is long over and all that comes with the pomp and hassle of her courtly life has been dealt with for the day, she comes home to find him in a chair by the fireplace reading a book. _Time of the Moon_ of all things. Inside the book's leatherbound front over in exquisite penmanship it had been signed, “To a Merigold from a Dandelion, with love from one flower to another”. It was a silly memento that Triss would always cherish. Week old boots that are already worn at the toe and dull are hitched up on the oaken coffee table. At first she doesn't want to say anything, she likes the way he looks there. He looks as though he is actually at home, exactly where she wants him to be.

Coming back up from the cellars, she interrupts his sonnets with a bottle of red wine, a very expensive gift from a very grateful and even more handsy Ofiri ambassador. The two of them have a joke at the expense of a rather bawdy line about a barmaid, and as the book is closed and cups are passed, they talk about rounds of cards and seedy patrons in bars, about trade agreements and alliances to be made. Normally they try to avoid politics, as both of them agree it ruins the taste of good drink, but she needs to vent and they're more than halfway finished with this bottle already. Her head begins to feel light as the rest of the bottle empties quicker than she thought it would, and in the reflection of his eyes she can see the tip of her nose turning red. Warmth envelops her body, and without thinking she asks him the first question that suddenly pops into her head.

“Geralt, am I a mistake?”

Except for the cackling of embers dying in the hearth there was silence. The White Wolf just looks at her with his stoic gaze, until eventually a smile that only few have seen before form on his lips. Over time she noticed there was a different smile for each of them. Yen always gets a crooked smile, an upturn of the right corner of his mouth as though he were laughing at some private joke only they get. With Ciri it's like a sunrise, it is a genuine smile that causes everything to become as bright as her personality, the kind a father would only give to his daughter. Her smile, the one for her only shared between them in bedrooms and on battlefields, is warm and causes her chest to tighten and her body tingle. It is the smile of the man she loves; the smile of a man in love with her.

“If you are then you're probably the best one I've ever made, and I've sure as shit have made a lot of them.”

Laughter explodes from her without warning and it fills the house, carrying it's song all the way up to the rafters and out the windows. Who knows where the chill northern winds will carry it after that. She hopes it makes it beyond the mountains somewhere, hopefully to the fellow sorceresses whom had doubted her, or to the other sorceress that she had wronged but had never mistaken. Perhaps she will invite Yen up for the winter. Maybe they can lick the wounds caused by one another and heal them properly with a good drink in the way only two lovesick women who shared a man could. It might even travel further than that, far enough to be picked up by the ears of an ashen-haired little sister, one she hopes is as happy as they are right now. With minimum effort on his part he lifts her up with his large arms, and cradles her to his chest, the way a husband would carry a bride over the threshold, and carries her up the stairs to their bedroom. Once again, like she does every night, she will melt in his arms and feel as though she were a young girl falling in love for the first time all over again.

Old habits die hard, she thinks.


End file.
